That Mind-Bending Phone Call on Last Night’s “Breaking Bad”

A few weeks ago, during a discussion of “Breaking Bad” on Twitter (my part-time volunteer gig), we all started yakking about the phenomenon of “bad fans.” All shows have them. They’re the “Sopranos” buffs who wanted a show made up of nothing but whackings (and who posted eagerly about how they fast-forwarded past anything else). They’re the “Girls” watchers who were aesthetically outraged by Hannah having sex with Josh(ua). They’re the ones who get furious whenever anyone tries to harsh Don Draper’s mellow. If you create a TV show, you’re probably required to say something in response to these viewers along the lines of, “Well, you know, whatever anyone gets out of the show is fine! It’s not my place to say. I’m just glad people are watching.”

Luckily, I have not created a show. So I will say it: some fans are watching wrong.

Because TV is, in its way, a live performance that goes on for years, shows tend to absorb the responses of its viewers. There is also a tendency, in late seasons of ambitious shows, for scripts to refract these tensions more explicitly, sometimes in an effective way, sometimes defensively. On “Lost,” the characters of Hurley and Arzt, and, later on, Frank and Miles, were clear stand-ins for certain types of “Lost” fans. On “The Sopranos,” the parodic horror film “Cleaver” looked a lot like the version of “The Sopranos” that those lousy fast-forwarders wished they were watching. On “Sex and the City,” the “face girl”—the judgmental lady who wouldn’t listen to Carrie’s side of the story—resembled, suspiciously, the fan who wouldn’t listen to Carrie’s side of the story.

In my earlier post about this season’s opening episode of “Breaking Bad,” I mentioned that Todd looked very much like the prototypical Bad Fan of “Breaking Bad”: he arrived late in the story, and he saw Walt purely as a kick-ass genius, worthy of worship (like Jesse, he called him Mr. White). Two episodes later, my hunch was confirmed when Todd excitedly re-told the entire Great Train Robbery desert caper to his Nazi uncle, including every single awesome, suspenseful detail but one: that pesky kid he’d shot. Bad Fan recapping in a nutshell! It was a short scene, but one that underlined what we all knew: if you ignore the dead kids, son, you are watching “Breaking Bad” wrong.

If that earlier episode provided a bit of meta-commentary on the Bad Fan, last night’s episode—a fantastic one, but also, emotionally speaking, very difficult to watch—included a sequence that, at first sight at least, seemed to take a thick black marker, underline the Bad Fan crisis three times, go over it with a meth-blue highlighter, and then scribble on the side “This!!!” But what the scene was doing finally struck me as far more layered, and more subversive, than anything I’ve seen in a late-stage show before.

The scene I refer to was that horrifying phone call, the one that seemed to be directed not merely at Skyler but at any fan who had started a Facebook page called “I Hate Skyler White.” We all know this fan: this is the Bad Fan who didn’t see it as abusive when Walt lied to Skyler nonstop; or when he sexually assaulted her in the kitchen; or when he overrode her restraining order and forced himself back into her home; or when he turned Walt, Jr., against her. These fans didn’t see it as abusive when Skyler had that tragic showdown at the pool, trying and failing to negotiate with Walt to keep their kids safe. They certainly didn’t see it as abusive when Walt continued to lie, long after Skyler had finally agreed to become, as they say in the wedding vows, his partner in crime.

But what was truly fascinating about that phone call was that if it was trolling the Bad Fan, it was also trolling me: the sort of feminist-minded sucker who took the speech at face value, for nearly an hour, until I suddenly realized, in a flash of clarity, that it was a fake-out for the police. (Skyler realized long before I did.) Once my analytical skills flared back into being, I was stunned by the moment’s effectiveness. I mean, on one level, that speech was just what it looked like: Walt venting every toxic feeling he’d ever had about his wife. On another level, it was the opposite: it was Walt pretending to be an abusive husband, as a gift to Skyler. It was an apology to her, as well as an attempt to get her off the hook legally, to honor Holly saying “Mama.” Walt’s language was pretty much a PowerPoint presentation of abuser behavior, designed to make Skyler’s case in court proceedings. And yet it still had the sting of catharsis, letting Walt say what he felt: that Skyler is a whiner, a nag, a drag, responsible for anything that happened to her. Like the Bad Fans who roam the Internet (and even some Good Fans, who can make a more reasonable case for disliking Skyler), he relishes calling her a bitch.

Now, that’s all at the Walt level, inside the story. At the fan-response level, though, the scene also had two sides. There was the part that was directed at the Bad Fan who hates Skyler, and who has written entire posts on Reddit indistinguishable from what Walt said, and who now got his own language shoved back in his face, labelled “abuser-talk.” And there was the part that was designed to sucker the Prissy Progressive Fan (me) who was all too eager to see Skyler as a pure victim, not merely of abusive Walt, but also of the Bad Fan. Vince Gilligan, you cunning bastard, I am confused and delighted. In one way, this scene was “Breaking Bad” having it both ways; in another way, it was the best kind of text, evading the simple read, as emotionally labile as I felt an hour after watching it.

Last night’s episode was certainly pungent. It was deftly plotted. Like so much of this season, it was nearly unbearable to watch, but a pleasure to think about. It left Hank dead; Marie bereaved; Walt, Jr., traumatized; and Jesse enslaved. It also played out the Baby Holly risk—something that had been hovering for the entire series—and resolved it, for now, thank God. (I could not have handled watching the show if, in the year before the flash-forward, Skyler was grieving while Walt was a happy stay-at-home single dad, complaining cryptically about his bitch of an ex-wife in some faraway tot lot.)

It’s hard to say that I’m looking forward to next week’s episode, exactly—I’m dreading it, if there is some positive, complimentary sense of the word “dread.” (They’ve probably got one in Berlin.) Either way, I’ll be watching with my fingers over my eyes. Bad Fans, Good Fans, we are all in this together now, suckers eternally, marching toward the void.